I?ve seen that the really savvy firms are developing a
hybrid cloud computing strategy focusing increasingly
on the platform-as-a-service layer as the lynch pin.
That is, a hybrid strategy which recognizes both the
role played by private clouds (often in large part a
repurposing of their existing IT assets) and the need
to create a bridge to trusted third party cloud
services providers. There is an increasing awareness
that middleware has a fundamental role to play
providing this bridge and that application
virtualization rather than infrastructure
virtualization is the way forward.
Application mobility is also beginning to be seen as a
key enabler giving firms not just the ability to
migrate workloads between their private cloud and a
preferred third party cloud services provider, but to
ensure they avoid being locked into a single cloud
services provider. This is analogous to a firm
hedging by sourcing hardware from, say, HP and IBM
while using the implicit threat that they could switch
to Dell at any minute to keep everyone on their toes
and because no one wins when there is a duopoly let
alone a monopoly.
One final point: While HPC teams have tremendous
experience developing large scale grids, that doesn?t
necessarily make them the right custodians of a firm?s
cloud strategy. Likewise I am not sure what general
conclusions one can draw from surveying a super
computing conference. All the headline statistic is
really saying is that 85% of HPC units surveyed intend
to stick to their knitting.
-Duncan Johnston-Watt, CEO, Cloudsoft
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